Twitter, Spotify Among Sites Affected by DDoS Attack on DNS (UPDATES)

Update 6:40 p.m. (E.T): A series of attacks on the DNS provider Dyn caused major websites like Twitter, Spotify and Paypal to go down, and while some users are able to access the websites, engineers at Dyn spent most of the day investigating and mitigating the attacks aimed at the DNS infrastructure. Just before 6:20 p.m. (E.T.), Dyn said the issue had been resolved.

The attacks, known as distributed denial of service or DDoS attacks, prevent legitimate users from accessing information or services. According to the Department of Homeland Security, the most common type of such an attack is when an attacker floods a network with information, preventing it from processing a request since it can only process a certain number of requests at once.

Dyn told CNBC that one of the sources of the attacks were devices such as DVRs and printers, things that are connected to the internet. The company said it did not know who the attackers were.

The attack also affected Dyn's advanced service monitoring, but that issue has since been resolved.

As explained by Fortune, DNS stands for domain name system and converts domain names that are readable by the internet. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security was investigating the attack, Reuters reported.

The first attack was reported around 7:10 a.m. (E.T.) but was resolved by 9:20 a.m. While the first attack was concentrated on the East Coast, Dyn said the second attack was distributed in a more global fashion.

"At Dyn, we take every incident seriously and work hard to ensure we deliver the service our customers have come to expect," the company said in a statement. "We will continue to evaluate every situation with the goal of improving our systems and processes to deliver the utmost customer experience. Thank you for your continued support."

Twitter suffered a partial service disruption and the service was fully operational again around 5:20 p.m. Spotify, GoFundMe, Eventbrite, Comcast, Airbnb, PayPal and Ubisoft are just some of the sites that were affected. Problems were also being reported with accessing the PlayStation network.

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Patch's report on the first attack:

A service interruption of the DNS network managed by the service provider Dyn led to a widespread outage of several popular sites including Twitter, Spotify and Airbnb. As of 9:20 a.m., Dyn said service had been restored to normal.

The service interruption was the result of a DDOS attack, TechCrunch reported. In a statement to reporters, Dyn said the attack was on its infrastructure on the east coast.

Here's @Dyn @DynResearch statement on Internet/DNS disruption by DDoS attack pic.twitter.com/0CSkSIDyC6
— ROBERT HACKETT ⭐️ (@rhhackett) October 21, 2016

Below is a list of sites affected by the attack:

Twitter

The company said the issue had been resolved. Between 4:10 and 6:10 (P.T.), some Twitter domains and Twitter.com were inaccessible due to failures resolving particular DNS host names.

Spotify

The music streaming service said the service was back to normal following earlier issues.

GitHub

The upstream DNS incident has been resolved. We continue to monitor our systems while they deliver a backlog of webhook events.
— GitHub Status (@githubstatus) October 21, 2016

Reddit

Reddit said it was aware of the DNS issue but the service was operating normally.

Vonage

The telephone service provider said it was seeing improvements after a report from the DNS provider that its services are being restored.

Comcast

Some customers had issues with their XFINITY TV service but the issues were resolving with the restoration of service.

Patch will update this breaking news story.

Image via Shutterstock